In 2010, the FKMCD asked Oxitec if it would do a field trial with its mosquitoes in Key West. The next year, the company applied for FDA approval. A media report that very month suggested that officials were hoping for a mosquito release as early as January 2012, prompting concerns among residents.

The petition raises prospects of unintended consequences, such as the emergence of a deadlier dengue virus that gets around the absence of A. aegypti. And residents in Key West say they don’t want to be tested like “guinea pigs” and “I don’t want my family being used as laboratory rats for this.” Michael Specter writes in The New Yorker:

There is, of course, another theoretical catastrophe to consider: a dengue epidemic in Key West. So far the city has largely been spared, but the region, as Oxitec’s chief scientist Luke Alphey told me when I spoke with him for my article, is “living in a sea of dengue.”

When Oxitec opened up Moscamed, a mosquito-production facility, earlier this month in Juazerio, residents cheered. But the University of Sao Paula team engaged the community before seeking approval for their trial from Brazil’s agency for biotechnological safety, CTNBio.